Our website uses cookies to improve your user experience. If you continue browsing, we assume that you consent to our use of cookies. More information can be found in our Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy.

Extent of companies’ UX testing

I think most people working in digital recognise the importance of user experience, but not everyone is putting this into practice. 45% of company are yet to carry out any testing, while 53% of agency respondents say their clients are not doing this.

While the ‘best guess’ can get you so far, a systematic approach can pay dividends, and save brands a lot of money.

On a more positive note, the majority of firms not testing are planning to change their approach in the next 12 months.

Q: Do you or your clients conduct any user experience testing?

Barriers to UX testing

Lack of budget is the most commonly listed barrier to testing, with 50% of client side and 65% of agencies citing this as the main issue.

However, with lower cost user experience testing methods beginning to emerge, and the fact that most marketers see the value in user experience improvement, we expect this to change over the next few years.

Indeed, as Origin Experience Design’s Founder and Director Simon King says, we have come a long way over the past few years:

If this survey had been conducted five years ago, or even three years ago, we would have seen a very different picture, with testing and UX, in general, still often a marginal activity. We can see through this report how far things have progressed, with agencies and client UX professionals successfully demonstrating the value of testing to improve web-development projects and increasing sales in particular.

Q: Why don’t you or your clients carry out any user experience testing?

Which UX testing techniques produce the best results?

We asked companies carrying out UX tests, and agencies whose clients did so, for their views on the most effective methods.

In person and lab user testing may be the most expensive method, but it was the most highly rated method according to our respondents.

According to Foolproof’s Tom Wood:

Often overlooked and sometimes maligned, good old user depth interviews (i.e. in person / lab user experience testing) emerge well from the survey. This testing technique was the top answer for: being very insightful, for providing the best ROI and for sheer popularity.

User depths come across as the work-horse of modern user experience design, reminding us that there really is no substitute for quietly watching and listening as your target audience grapples with your user experience.

After this, content testing such as MVT was next followed by remote user testing, as offered by Whatusersdo (you can see an example on this site review).

Q: Please select the top three user experience testing techniques that you perceive to provide the best ROI (even if you have not used any of them)

I’ll leave the final word to WhatUsersDo CEO Lee Duddell:

As digital professionals we need to answer “Why?”. We need to understand the why of user and customer behaviour so we can move beyond the incremental improvements that MVT ultimately leads to and step beyond the how many of Google Analytics by applying user insight (and not hunches) to our decision making.

I’d like 2013 to be the year where we convince organisations that user experience = brand and that real improvement and change can only really come about by understanding users.

Recommended

For digital marketers, understanding the audience a platform offers access to is crucial. After all, if you don’t know who you will be reaching, it’s all but impossible to craft messages and experiences that resonate.

The good news: digital channels are generally understood far better than their offline counterparts because users can be tracked far more comprehensively and accurately. The bad news: the make-up of digital channels can change, and sometimes quite rapidly. This is particularly true in social channels, where what’s hot today is not hot tomorrow.

The number of NFC-enabled smartphones available in Australia is expected to rise dramatically, growing from 375,000 in Q1 2012 to 2.125 million in Q1 2013 – a growth of 467% year-on-year – according to Tapit.

It has also been forecast that by Q4, the number of NFC handsets in Australia will reach some 4 million – or 30% of all smartphones on the market.

For many years since its release, the Android OS has been behaving like a teenager in the grip of raging hormones. Growth has been nothing short of explosive and the changes have been sweeping and profound.

With the release of Ice-Cream Sandwich OS, the UI standards and design elements have changed dramatically and the platform has really matured and even stabilized somewhat.

Nevertheless, the OS has retained it’s rebellious hacker DNA with unique features that are authentically Android.

Here’s a huge stat that hasn’t been getting much attention lately: nearly half of all marketing emails are now being read on mobile devices.

This is a really important trend, so I’ll repeat it in a different way. When you send your next email campaign, more customers will read it on smartphones than in a web browser (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.).

Which begs the question: are your emails optimized for opens, reads and click-throughs from all these mobile users?

I’m about to move house. Which, as is usual, has involved a painful bank transfer and a lot of paperwork.

One of the steps of self-imposed due diligence I did was to check my credit file. Everything was fine, I had a credit score in the region I expected / hoped and that was the end of it. Contracts done. Property secured.

It got me thinking, though. That one little number is very powerful but, given today’s focus on big data, actually very simplistic in its nature.

For something that can dictate major elements of your life (such as helping the bank decide whether or not you are ‘fit’ to buy a home), the process by which the three main credit reference agencies (Equifax, Experian and Callcredit in the UK) apply a sweeping judgement feels flawed.

I wondered if, instead, social data could provide a more accurate picture of people.